Biodiversity Extinction Crisis Conference - A Pacific Response

Session Details

Tackling the Twin Crises: Legal and Institutional Frameworks to Protect Biodiversity and the Climate

Thursday, 12 July 2007 09:05 -10:35

Bio-Med Theatre A

We face two great and inter-linked planetary crises: biodiversity extinction and global warming. Climate and biodiversity interact in many complex ways, each influencing the other. It is vital that action to address one does not negatively impact on the other (for example clearing tropical forests for energy crops).

To tackle the twin crises, we need strong governance which works coherently at scales from global to local and over long periods of time. Legislation, institutions and economic frameworks need to reinforce each other with the aim of conserving biodiversity, minimising climate change and adapting to its impacts. They are the necessary complement to the ‘whole of landscape’ conservation projects described in the related symposium on landscape conservation in Australia which are designed to integrate and maintain landscape ecological function.

We have in the Australia Pacific region a range of governance models for the protection of biodiversity, including Indigenous management of country, Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, New Zealand’s Resource Management Act, and a variety of approaches in Pacific Island countries. At the international level, there is the Apia Convention on Conservation of Nature in the South Pacific (ratified by Australia and some Pacific Island Countries), the International Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Heritage Convention (both ratified by Australia, New Zealand and most Pacific Island countries). The Biodiversity Convention has a target of significantly reducing biodiversity loss by 2010 which has recently been incorporated into the Millennium Development Goals.

This symposium will review the existing models, and open discussion on the changes needed. It follows the Biodiversity Summit 2006, which reviewed Australia’s legislation and institutions, identifying particularly the dearth of national legislative protection for biodiversity at the landscape level, and the lack of coordination between regulation, planning and public funding.